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Panel description:
This panel invites you to reflect on the history of social democracy
from a Leftist viewpoint. Such a perspective raises the specter of the
Socialist (Second) International—the Marxist political organization that
led the workers movement for socialism around the turn of the 20th
century. In the U.S. this politics found its expression in Eugene Debs, a
radical labor leader converted to Marxism in prison by reading the
German Marxist Karl Kautsky; in Germany, in Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Leibknecht’s Communist Party of Germany, inheritor of the Spartacist
League’s opposition to joining the German state’s war effort during the
First World War; and in Russia, most famously, in the capture of state
power by the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin. Thus the Second International
gave rise to what is arguably the greatest attempt to change the world
in history: the revolutions of 1917–19, in Russia, Germany, Hungary and
Italy. In these revolutions, Communists split from Social Democrats, the
latter of whom formed the bulwark of counterrevolution. During much of
the 20th century, a “Marxist-Leninist” approach to this history
prevailed on much of the “hard” left, according to which the Second
International revolutionaries had effectively superseded the politics of
more Right-wing figures within Social Democracy (such as Kautsky); the
Third International has in this respect been widely accepted as an
advance upon the Second.
In the 1930s, the rise of fascism seemed to sideline the Communist
vs. Social Democrat controversy. A generation later, after WWII, these
same Social Democratic parties in the West engaged in wide-ranging
reforms, while still opposing Communism in the East. For a few decades
of supposed "convergence" between East and West, it seemed that the
earlier "evolutionary" view of achieving socialism, contra Communist
revolution, might be proven correct. But the New Left in the West
emerged in opposition to such reformism, in search of more radical
politics. The New Left saw itself as in keeping with the earlier
revolutionary tradition, even with significant changes offered to it. In
the neoliberal era, however, this division between reform and
revolution has been blurred if not erased. Today, by contrast, social
democracy is on the defensive against neoliberalism, even while its
memory is resuscitated by such phenomena as SYRIZA, Podemos, Jeremy
Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
But: Do we in fact need to reckon with the earlier history of Marxism, before the split between Communists and Social Democrats, in order to understand the problem and project of social democracy today? How are the questions of social democracy and social revolution related today, in light of history? What has social democracy come to signify politically?
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